AFTER the spectacular Ashes series 12 years ago the sport was lost to pay-per-view but there’s talk of bringing it back.

Freddie Flintoff and the England cricket team of 2005 captivated the nation in The Ashes

The nation was gripped as Andrew Flintoff’s England team wrestled The Ashes back from Australia for the first time in 16 years in 2005.

More than eight million people watched the epic Test series on Channel 4, the last time cricket’s most enduring rivalry was screened on terrestrial TV.

Viewing figures have plummeted since Sky was given exclusive broadcasting rights to the sport in a lucrative deal after this victory, so now England’s cricket board is looking to return some international matches to free-to-air TV.

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We have no ambition to be the richest, most irrelevant sport in the country

Tom Harrison

This is long overdue to stop the quintessentially English summer pastime, once considered our national sport, from becoming an irrelevance. At its heyday 12 years ago, an estimated 22.65 million people watched at least 30 minutes of The Ashes series, with families crowded around TV sets in their front rooms to see the climax of a titanic Second Test at Edgbaston in Birmingham.

After being soundly beaten in the first Test at Lord’s, England roared back to take the second Test by just two runs.

But it was the sportsmanship of “Freddie” Flintoff in consoling a despondent Brett Lee before celebrating the victory that made him a household name.

GETTY

GETTY

A peak of just 1.3 million people watched the final day of the first Ashes Test in England in 2015

Cricket had reached a level of mass popularity not seen since Ian Botham’s heroics in The Ashes at Headingley in 1981. This surge in support for skipper Michael Vaughan’s 2005 Ashes heroes was a major factor in the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) landing a big-money TV deal with Sky Sports (then BSkyB), which granted the subscription network exclusive broadcast rights from 2006 to 2009.

The Sky TV deal has since been extended and now pays £65 million a year on average, which is 37 per cent of the ECBs reported £175 million annual turnover.

This extra capital was supposed to allow the ECB to grow grassroots participation and its fanbase. Instead, by hiding the crown jewel of cricket, The Ashes series, behind a pay-wall it has done the opposite, with viewing numbers plummeting during the past decade.

A peak of just 1.3 million people watched the final day of the first Ashes Test in England in 2015. With the latest instalment of the enduring sporting rivalry set to resume in Australia at the end of this year, it is feared even fewer people will see what is shaping up to be another classic encounter between two evenly matched teams.

England will be led by exciting, new captain Joe Root with the game’s biggest rising star, Durham all-rounder Ben Stokes, set to take centre stage after wowing in India’s 20-over IPL franchise. Stokes, 25, was paid £1.7 million to play for Rising Pune Supergiant in India’s premier competition, fully justifying his status as its most valuable player with a series of match-winning performances.

The fact that most of the younger viewing public has never seen Stokes live in action, only in glimpses on Channel 5’s highlights programmes, finally seems to have made the penny drop for England’s cricket chiefs.

Documents leaked last week suggested the ECB wants some cricket back on free-to-air television by 2020 to prevent the game sliding further into obscurity.

Tom Harrison, the chief executive officer of the board, has said: “We have no ambition to be the richest, most irrelevant sport in the country.”

Critics fear the leaked proposals may not be enough to reverse the trend, as Test cricket and particularly The Ashes are likely to remain behind a pay-wall, with only a few 20-over international games shown for free.

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But this must still be seen as a step in the right direction, as the popularity of other sports hidden behind pay-walls have suffered similar declines to cricket. Boxing was a mainstream sport in the 1990s, when it was shown for free on ITV. Its popularity peaked with the screening of two clashes between middleweight world champions Chris Eubank and Nigel Benn.

A quarter of the nation, 16 million people, tuned in to watch their second encounter at Old Trafford on October 9, 1993, but now only Olympic champions attract a similar level of interest after being seen on the BBC coverage of the sporting showpiece.

One of these former Olympians and now world heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua has revived the appeal of this sport by beating Ukrainian great Wladimir Klitschko at a packed Wembley Stadium last month, but his success would have a far greater impact if shown on terrestrial TV.

In many ways rugby union has shown how important success being seen by the public is, with the Six Nations securing viewing figures that Vaughan, now a cricket pundit, admits to being envious of.

He says: “I just get really jealous on a Six Nations weekend and I hear that eight million people are watching a rugby match and cricket isn’t getting that kind of audience.”

Vaughan is right in adding that cricket can make up the ground it has lost but until more than just “a few” matches return to terrestrial TV, I fear it will struggle to capture the hearts and minds of the nation as it did during the glorious summer of 2005.